Asian Folklore Studies articles from October 1 1997

Asian Folklore Studies archives from October 1 1997

Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier.
October 1, 1997... The book under review deals with the narrative world of Afghan tribesmen living on the Pakistani side of the border. Most of the people Edwards interviewed for the stories analyzed in this volume fled to Pakistan as a result of the 1978 Marxist...

Devi: Goddesses of India.
October 1, 1997... Devi: Goddesses of India is a well-written, engaging anthology devoted to furthering our understanding and appreciation of the multifaceted ways in which India's goddess traditions are negotiated and become meaningful in practice. Edited by John...

Explorations in Philippine Folklore.
October 1, 1997... Explorations in Philippine Folklore is exactly what the title says it is. This slim collection of essays encompasses a broad spectrum of the topics and methods of analysis found in the field of folklore, all centered on the diverse Philippine...

Where the Roads Met: East and West in the Silk Production Process (17th to 19th Century).
October 1, 1997... To what extent did Chinese silk technology influence the development of European sericulture? How did Europeans try to acquire technological information from East Asia? These constitute the central themes of Where the Roads Met. Though brief,...

Kankoku minzoku e no shotai.
October 1, 1997... The author is a researcher in folklore and cultural anthropology who has theoretically organized and analyzed material on Korean shamanism that he has gathered through his own fieldwork, and who has published widely on this topic. In recent years...

Die Mythen des alten Japan.
October 1, 1997... Nelly Naumann, a German Japanologist well known to readers of Asian Folklore Studies through her contributions on Japanese folklore and other topics, has published an introduction to ancient Japanese mythology. After an introductory chapter in...

Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends.
October 1, 1997... This small book introduces the reader to an understanding of Japanese culture by focusing on customs related to death and the ghost legends of Japan. As David Bufford states in his forward to this book, the merit of this endeavor lies in its...

The Gods Come Dancing: A Study of the Japanese Ritual Dance of Yamabushi Kagura.
October 1, 1997... Dance, "read like a rich and informative cultural text" (258), forms the fundamental basis for Irit Averbuch's profound research into a certain form of yamabushi kagura in the mountainous part of Honshu in northern Japan. Kagura, the most ancient...

On Printed Matter and Beyond: Media, Orality and Literacy.
October 1, 1997... This book is a collection of Kees Epskamp's papers presented at various international meetings. Most were written in Dutch and translated into English by the language lab of CESO. Though not always related in terms of sequence and logic, they all...

Beru Dayang: the concept of female spirits and the movement of fertility in Karo Batak culture. (Sumatra)
October 1, 1997... This paper describes and analyzes the concept of a female spirit, called Beru Dayang, among the Karo, one of the six Batak peoples of North Sumatra, Indonesia. The term beru dayang(1) appears in ritual chants, in the process and rituals of...

Dewi Sri in village garb: fertility, myth, and ritual in Northeast Java.
October 1, 1997... Javanese rice myths have been the subject of extensive descriptive and analytical studies from the time of the early ethnographers until the present (see WINTER 1843; VAN DER WEIJDEN 1981). For a region as geographically and culturally diverse as...

A princess from Sunda: some aspects of Nyai Roro Kidul.
October 1, 1997... Nyai Roro Kidul, the Goddess of the Southern or Indian Ocean, is one of the most discussed characters in the Javanese spirit world. The mythology surrounding this goddess, who is also known under a variety of other names (see RICKLEFS 1974, 200,...

Kanjeng Ratu Kindul: the second divine spouse of the sultans of Ngayogyakarta. (Javanese mythological queen)
October 1, 1997... Whoever as a child heard the sound of the kentongan (slit-drums) along the river Code as the drums accompanied Ratu Kidul on her journeys high above the water to the volcano Merapi(1) learned early on to associate the Ratu with fresh as well as...

Tara and Nyai Lara Kidul: images of the divine feminine in Java.
October 1, 1997... In the immediate environs of the provincial capital of Yogyakarta lies the ruin of Candi Kalasan, a Buddhist temple often regarded as one of the most beautiful temples of Central Java. This temple is one of the few Javanese archaeological...

Sandhang-pangan for the goddess: offerings to Sang Hyan Bathari Durga and Nyai Lara Kidul. (Hindu-Javanese goddess)
October 1, 1997... The title of this article mentions two powerful female spirits who are both feared and worshiped in contemporary Java. The goddess Sang Hyang Bathari Durga, considered to be the female ruler of the spirit world, is still often associated with the...

Offerings to Durga and Pretiwi in Bali. (goddesses)
October 1, 1997... The Balinese pantheon is very extensive, encompassing deified ancestors, local deities, and Hindu gods and goddesses.(1) Although the importance of many of these invisible beings varies from place to place, most Balinese are familiar with two...

The goddess Durga in the East-Javanese period.
October 1, 1997... Archaeological remains in the form of statues of the goddess (bhatari) Durga, Durga the destroyer of Mahisagura, are quite numerous in Java. The oldest of these statues is estimated to date from around the eighth century C.E., while the most...

Irrigation and State Formation in Hunza: The Anthropology of a Hydraulic Kingdom. (includes author's response)
October 1, 1997... The book under review deals with the alleged direct linkage between a complex irrigation system in a high-mountain region of the Northwest Karakorum and the process of state formation. The author attempts to prove that the "centrally-controlled...

The Cilappatrikaram of Ilanko Atikal: An Epic of South India.
October 1, 1997... Cilappatrikaram, or the story of Kovalan and Kannaki, is the most important literary work of the Tamils of South India. Furthermore, this ancient story, in many forms, is well known among many other Dravidian cultures of South India and some...

Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales.
October 1, 1997... This book is about the tales told in the Javanese shadow-puppet (wayang) theater, specifically the wayang purwa, which uses flat, leather puppets, as presented in the Central Javanese court town of Solo. This being said, the statement should at...

Zwischen Himmel und Erde. Riten und Brauchtum in Nordwestchina.
October 1, 1997... The photograph on the cover shows a Chinese peasant driving three loaded donkeys downhill on a long, dusty road. The road leads through a sunny but barren hilly landscape. It is as if the peasant invited the reader to follow him into Between...

Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity.
October 1, 1997... Laurel Kendall, Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History, is an anthropologist who has published several books on Korean women, especially female shamans. In the present volume Kendall shows us the...

The Beginning of Heaven and Earth: The Sacred Book of Japan's Hidden Christians.
October 1, 1997... The story of Japan's "underground" or "hidden" (Kakure) Christians has been told often, but rarely well. In its most common form, the story describes how Christianity spread rapidly in Japan during the second half of the sixteenth century, when...